Throughout Jay-Z's Fade to Black, the rap superstar talks about the importance of making his final album great, and about how big his November 2003 concert at Madison Square Garden needs to be. Both are profiled in the film. It would have been nice if the man they called Jigga, put a little of that focus in helping to make an absorbing chronicle of those heady times. Fade to Black, for all of the cultural hoopla involved, isn't much different from a concert DVD with some extra footage thrown in.

I'm sure fans of Jay-Z will be enthralled as his improvised rhymes and speedy eloquence join forces with an array of talent from the hip-hop community, including Missy Elliott, R. Kelly, Mary J. Blige, and Pharrell Williams. Everyone else will feel like they're watching a movie that's perpetually halfway over.

Well, it turns out that a movie based on a one-joke premise (white guys in Iowa think they're gangsta rappers and, you know, front) can indeed fill 90 minutes with that one joke.

Too bad the joke is not funny. At all. Whiteboys (aka the street-friendly Whiteboyz) claims "It's all good!" but that's far from the truth. Actually, it's all insulting and moronic, as Hoch and co. try their hand at street talk and drug dealing with deliterious effects. Is this a comedy? I don't think so. Not on purpose, anyway. The film gets even worse with Hoch's frequent regressions into dream-sequence land, punctuated by real rapper cameos.

From Mississippi Masala to Jungle Fever, interracial dating has always been an exciting topic that Hollywood has embraced and ended up using to produce... some really boring movies.

The overly familiar-sounding Brooklyn Babylon features (see if you can guess) a Rastafarian black man (Tariq Trotter) and a Jewish woman (Karen Goberman) who come together on the eve of nearly full-blown race riots, all brought on because of a fender bender between his friend and her brother. Oy vey, now that's original.